by L. T. Vargus
You see your hand reach for the doorknob, alarmed for a second at the sight of it, as though this flesh somehow wasn’t your own. Foreign. Disembodied.
The inside of the building smells like bean soup, just a little, but you’re away from the cold. Away from the city. One step removed, anyway.
It occurs to you that the hallway of your building sits between two worlds. A quiet place resting between home and the revolting world. The awkwardness of being in neither always gives you goose bumps. Striking and strange to walk betwixt the worlds. Almost religious.
And now wooden stairs creak as you climb them, your world tilted into an ascent. Three flights of moaning risers and cracking treads, the grains of lumber lifting their voices to squawk at you like birds.
It’s an old building. Built just after the turn of the century. Still standing for no good reason.
You move down the hallway like a camera zooming in. Going slow to build the tension maybe. Almost there.
And the door stands between you and yet another world. A barrier of thin wood just taller and wider than a casket. Painted pale yellow.
You hesitate at this final threshold. Needing, somehow, to muster some fresh willpower to push through and be done with it, to find your way home after another of your excursions.
At last you bring the key to the deadbolt. Push it in. Twist. And the door moves aside.
You shuffle through the doorway. The air feels different than that in the hallway. Warmer.
And the faint bean soup odor fades out. Replaced by the waft of some kind of potpourri in a little decorative ceramic pot on the table just inside your place. You’re not sure what exactly the wood chip looking crap is. Its presence here wasn’t of your doing.
The door to your cell clicks shut behind you, and you slide off your shoes.
Home. Home is where the heart is. At least for tonight.
You stride down the hall, and there she is. Callie.
Your body feels different when you see her. Some frequency changing in your head like an unseen hand shifting the radio dial.
She stands in the kitchen. Plucking little styrofoam KFC containers out of a plastic bag. Arranging chicken and green beans and mashed potatoes and gravy on two plates.
Strands of dark hair hang down in front of her face. Revealing only the chin, the jaw, the full bottom lip.
She senses your presence in the kitchen doorway. Looks up at you. Smiles.
And that tension leaves your upper back. That twitchy violence vacates your body. Some strange lightness fluttering in your head like dragonfly wings instead. The wind flows in and out of you with ease. No more tightness in your chest to hold it back.
You move to her. Kiss her on the cheek and then on the smiling teeth.
You feel like someone else when you touch her, express affection for her physically. And maybe you are someone else in these moments. Maybe you are.
“I made KFC for dinner,” she says, and you laugh a little.
It’s one of her recurring jokes. Claiming she made whatever fast food she just bought.
“My favorite,” you say. This is what you say no matter what, the completion of the ritual.
You take the plate, and the two of you move to the couch. Watch the news while you eat. Channel 7. They always lead with the blood and guts when they can, so they trounce all the other local channels in the ratings.
The anchors talk about a fatal car crash, a daycare worker charged with child molestation, a local election the polls say will be too close to call. Nothing about the killings tonight, though, which is a surprise.
Still, seeing the graphics flash on the screen, hearing the strange cadence of the anchors, it brings back a twinge of that fear, that loathing feeling you get when you watch them talk about what you’ve done. Even with Callie next to you, you feel it.
And the picture of the body opens in your head. Slumped in the bathtub. Waiting there even now for you to take care of things before someone finds out.
Other pictures open, too. Flashing in your head like a strobe light.
There was another body you couldn’t move. Before this one. And the daylight wasn’t a factor in that one. Too big. Too heavy and awkward. A slick sack of flesh that slid out of your grip over and over. Plopped back into the bathwater. Splishy-splashy.
You had to leave it. Had to. Certain it would be the one that got you caught. The nerves made you sick for the next week. Flu-like symptoms that wouldn’t go away. Your whole body going hot and cold at the same time, sweating and shivering.
But the days and weeks went by, and somehow, nothing happened. No headlines. No Channel 7 news van camped outside the place to get their shots of the grisly details. Nothing at all.
Could it be there still? The corpse submerged in bathwater. It’d be broken down by now. Something closer to a skeleton face down in a puddle of goo, a pool of liquefied human remains. Something that would smell a whole lot worse than bean soup.
Callie clears the plates.
“Are you staying tonight?” you say, your voice smaller than you want, weaker than you want.
Her smile looks sad.
“Not tonight,” she says. “But soon.”
You try to smile back, try not to sulk too openly, try to conceal the wound peeling open your ribcage, laying bare your heart.
Even if she has redecorated your place, she has to hide this thing between you. So she says. You don’t know why.
Sometimes you think that if she just stayed with you, moved into your place, you wouldn’t go do the things you do. Wouldn’t need to.
But maybe not. Maybe that’s not true at all.
She comes to you. Sits on the couch next to you. Touches you. Her frail body leaned up against yours.
“Tomorrow. I’ll stay tomorrow night. I promise.”
She is a wispy thing. All made of sticks with a soft layer stretched over them. Feminine. As light as one of those desserts that’s mostly made of air. As light as a soufflé.
And her arms circle around you. Squeeze.
Chapter 14
Darger’s foot tapped impatiently in the hotel elevator. She couldn’t wait to get to her room, to take a bath and wash away the sticky feeling she always got from traveling.
Her stomach lurched a little as the elevator came to a stop with a ding. The brushed steel doors parted, and Darger exited into a hushed hallway that smelled like lemon cleaner. The wheels of her suitcase bumped over the seams in the carpet.
She paused in front of her room, swiped her keycard in the electronic lock, and waited for the light to turn green. When it did, she wrenched the door open and entered.
It was a dumpy little room with striped carpet and ugly, boxy furniture that might have been considered contemporary twenty years ago. The sink was placed in the sleeping area, with only the toilet and the tub/shower combo in the bathroom proper. A true sign, in Darger’s opinion, of a high-class joint.
Margaret Prescott’s assistant had asked Darger what kind of hotel she preferred, if there were any particular amenities she requested. The girl seemed surprised when Darger told her to book whatever was cheapest. Had it been another one of Prescott’s tricks? Or maybe that was supposed to be one of the perks of being a private consultant.
Whatever the case, Darger didn’t fool herself into thinking that a higher-priced place was any less grim and disgusting as a cheap one. The fact was, she was still resting her head on a pillow a thousand other people had slept on and showering in a stall a thousand other people had been naked in.
Hotels were hotels. They never felt like home. And she wasn’t here to soak in the hot tub or to laze around in a robe ordering room service. There was work to do.
She switched on the TV. It was one of those house shows. The woman — Darger assumed she was the prospective buyer — was whining about the lack of a walk-in closet in the master suite and the color of the granite countertops in the kitchen.
“And where are my all-stainless appliances?” the woman dem
anded.
First world problems, Darger thought, snorting derisively as she slid out of her jacket and kicked off her boots. She considered changing the channel, then changed her mind. She only really wanted some background noise.
The bathroom light flickered twice before coming on all the way. Darger swept the shower curtain out of the tub and turned on the taps.
Water gushed from the chrome fixture, sounding like a thousand drums playing at once as it struck the bottom of the basin. She wiggled her fingers under the stream to get the temperature right, then stood back and watched the burbling flow. Her mind churned along with the water.
Finding the stalker’s lair behind Shannon Mead’s house could be big. Very big. They might be able to get fingerprints or even trace DNA from the wrappers and bottles. And then there was the symbol scribbled on the fence. Was it a clue? A calling card left by the killer?
She bounced on her feet, feeling giddy. The way she always felt when a new piece of evidence was discovered.
And then she thought of Shannon Mead’s mother. The anguish on her face as she wept for her daughter. Darger’s glee vanished as quickly as it had appeared.
She peeled off her socks and left them in rolled up balls on the floor. As she unbuttoned her shirt, she considered the puzzling evidence Fowles had found. Why did the blow fly larvae on Shannon Mead suggest she’d been dead for almost seven days when she’d only been missing for five?
Darger picked up one of the complimentary bottles of bath and shower goop on the counter, squinting to read the miniature print on the label. Honey Lavender Conditioner. She set the bottle down and picked up the other two. They were the same flavor as the conditioner, but one was labeled Shampoo and the other Body Wash.
“That’ll do,” Darger said to herself.
Twisting off the lid, she gave it a sniff and then squirted a blob of the body wash into the tub. It frothed and foamed for a few seconds, and then most of the suds dissipated. Not exactly a bubble bath, but at least it smelled a little nicer than the straight tap water, which reeked of chlorine.
She stood by and watched the waterline rise millimeter by millimeter. As it crept closer to the overflow drain, Darger leaned over the edge of the tub and turned off the water. The rumble cut out, and the sing-songy voices of a TV commercial filtered in through the open bathroom door.
The water rippled beneath her, and she caught sight of her reflection in the undulating surface, remembering the sensation that had overwhelmed her when she’d gazed into the water at the spot where they’d pulled Shannon Mead from the river.
Darger froze, a prickle of precognitive awareness running through her before the revelation hit her fully.
The autopsy confirmed that Shannon Mead’s cause of death was drowning. There was water in her lungs.
The only way she could reconcile the insect evidence with everything else they’d found was to imagine the killer drowning her in the river, taking her somewhere else, and then returning her to the river. And that made no sense.
But what if he hadn’t drowned her in the river after all?
What if the water in her lungs had come from another source?
Darger stared down into the bathwater.
Like a bathtub.
She closed her eyes, and a revised version of the kill scene played out in her head. He stooped, not next to a river this time, but a bathtub, pressing his victim’s face down near the drain, water cascading from the faucet to obscure her features.
Darger bolted for the door, bare feet slapping over the tile, then remembered her phone was in her pocket. She wrestled it out, found the phone number for the local medical examiner’s office, and dialed.
The phone gurgled in Darger’s ear as she paced the room. Her bath was forgotten. Everything but the mystery of Shannon Mead was forgotten.
Chapter 15
Time changes when you’re alone. Especially in the dark. It elongates. Stretches out like a soft piece of taffy. Loses what little meaning it ever has for you.
You can’t help but check your phone over and over. Lighting up that blinding screen in the gloom like some kind of beacon. The minutes slow until they stop, until you’re certain they’ll reverse soon, that time will go backward. That the fabric of this plane will unravel or cave in or implode. That nothingness will conquer everything at last. Put humanity out of its misery.
You hunker down in your bed. Wrap yourself in scratchy blankets like some shroud. Offer yourself to the gods of slumber. But you know they won’t oblige, know that sleep won’t take you. Not for a while, anyway.
So you blink and fidget. You stare into the black, stare up into the wall of shadow where the ceiling should be. It looks hollow now. Empty.
The whole world is empty. Whenever you’re alone, the world is empty.
But you’re not uncomfortable, even if you’re feeling weird. You’re used to it.
The restless part of you wants to head out. To walk the night. To see all there is to see in the dark, when the rules of the day no longer exist.
But you can’t. You can’t. You need to rest for now. You’ll go out in your truck tonight. Move her in the deepest dead of the night while the rest of the world sleeps. Much later than this.
So you sleep off and on. Shake yourself awake every fifteen minutes or so.
In fractured dreams, you ride a gondola through the canals of some foreign city. Pushing it along with your oar.
The boat drifts atop the water. Cuts through its surface like one of your knives. Picking up speed.
The sensation of movement dredges up half-formed memories of riding in a canoe as a kid, feeling exhilarated by the way you both moved on and through the water. The way the pointed tip of the vessel seemed to part the lake and push some of it to each side. Excited by that. And yet scared to death the aluminum thing would tip and dump you into the black depths. Tumble you down into nothingness. A kind of wet abyss that could steal your breath.
This canal, too, seems deep. Treacherous. Unknowable.
The water churns everywhere around you. Dark water that lurches and spits along the side of the boat. Murky. Almost looks like it’s boiling in places. Disturbing somehow to look at.
And strange concrete structures rise up from the water’s edge. Towers. Tall cylinders that reach for the heavens, these strange tubes set against the horizon. Silos, you think. And you know, somehow, that these buildings house people. Stack them right on top of each other like freshly split firewood. Pile them up into the sky.
You can imagine the smell of it. All of that humanity confined in tight quarters like that. Something akin to a barn smell, an industrial livestock smell, a factory farm nightmare, but a version that would retain some particularly human note to it. A bodily stench like Swiss cheese and dirty socks entwined with the normal manure odor.
You adjust your grip on the oar. Fingers tightening around the wood so hard that it almost hurts.
And you plunge the thing toward the bottom of the canal. Thrust it as hard as you can. Dig around a bit.
But you feel nothing solid. Nothing beyond the resistance of the water itself. If the bottom is down there, you can’t reach it. Can’t find it.
And still you pick up speed. Accelerate even without rowing. The water froths now where your iron prow slices into it. A violence to the act that you find exciting.
The concrete changes on the horizon ahead. The walls of the canal closing in. Forming a tunnel. A hole in the wall that the water flows into.
You stare into the mouth of the thing. The darkness. And you resist the urge to steer the boat off to the side. You know you must enter this cave for good or ill.
You swallow hard as the threshold nears. Brace yourself for whatever comes next.
The concrete hole swallows the little gondola. Seems to suck it right up.
And the darkness is total. Endless. Stifling.
You can feel it somehow on your skin. A cold prickle that worms into your pores.
You know that it m
eans you harm, the darkness. That it holds you in contempt.
You drift for what feels like a long time. The little boat rocking beneath you. The water rockier now than it was before.
Somewhere ahead a glow takes shape. Yellow light flickering on the concrete, on the water. A lantern hanging from the rounded wall.
And getting closer, that glittering light shimmers off the walls. Shiny. Wet walls. Wet and red.
Bloody.
The concrete arch above you seems to morph as you go deeper. Flesh now coating the cement. Seeming to thicken over it like some kind of fungal growth advancing the length of the tube.
Skin. Human skin.
Some of it has the texture and shade of a pale inner arm. Hairless and milky white.
Other parts consist of red flesh like the inside of a lip, glistening as though lubricated with saliva.
And your heart thrums now. Rapid fire beats. Your chest heaves.
Somehow you know that all of life’s mysteries await at the end of this length of tunnel. All will be revealed.
You want to know where this goes more than you’ve ever wanted anything, and yet you remain deathly afraid of actually arriving there.
But whatever you want or don’t, this journey ends soon. You can feel it.
Terrifying and exhilarating.
The lantern light fades. The dark returning. But you can see the end ahead. A semi-circle of light.
The boat slams atop the water now. Popping up and crashing down, the wood of the hull cracking with each thrust. The waves hateful and violent around you. You huddle and hold on.
And as you near you the light at the end of the tunnel, you snap awake. In your room. In your bed.
It’s time to move the body.
Chapter 16
Darger climbed into bed and felt the sheets slowly go from cool to warm to match her body heat. She tried closing her eyes, but they kept snapping back open to stare at the popcorn ceiling, that ugly texture emerging from the shadows.
Alert. Wired. The opposite of sleepy. She may as well have just chugged three coffees and washed them down with a Red Bull.